Why doesn't God heal homosexuals?

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Prodigal_Son said:
I would echo this. I think that homosexual attractions would be more likely experienced by people who are in cultures which encourage them. But heterosexual attractions are not similarly fluid. Look, again, at the ancient Greeks and Romans. Even when attraction to females was considered somewhat gauche among aristocrats, men married women as a matter of course, and Aristophanes was writing comedies about how sexy women were.
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I’m not convinced that we know enough at this point to say that homosexuality and heterosexuality are distinctly different in the biological, genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie them. And we don’t really have much to go on to test your hypothesis that heterosexual attractions would somehow be more durable than homosexual ones even in the face of social pressures against them since we don’t have any real examples of societies where heterosexuality was discouraged.

And I think that it’s an overstatement to say that “attraction to females was considered somewhat gauche among aristocrats” in Ancient Rome and Greece. As Craig Williams says in his book, Roman Homosexuality 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 4, 18-20:
To judge by the textual material left to us, homosexuality turns out not to have been an important issue for Romans. Nor, for that matter was heterosexuality. It is one of the fundamental premises of this book - one that it aims to justify - that Roman men were not encouraged by their cultural heritage to categorize, much less evaluate or judge, sexual acts and agents on the basis of whether only males or males and females were involved…

What then, were the traditional protocols governing sexual practices between males among Romans?.. What was at stake was less a man’s actual behavior and more the appearance he gave and the image he had: how he was seen and talked about by his peers more than what he actually did in the privacy of his bedroom…

First and foremost, a self-respecting Roman man must always give the appearance of playing the insertive role in penetrative acts, and not the receptive role…A second protocol governing men’s sexual behavior concerned the status of their partners, and here too the rule applied regardless of their partner’s sex: apart from his wife, freeborn Romans both male and female were officially off limit sexual partners for a Roman man…

A conceptual system that gives rise to a prime directive that a man should appear to play the insertive role with his partners, whether they are male or female, necessarily includes an understanding that it is normative (natural and normal, we might say) for a man to desire sexual contact with male and female bodies alike.
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Rau said:
Homosexual acts are the things - unequivocally - of “grave depravity”. The other words all suffer from various levels of ambiguity in their common usage. Some are using “homosexuality” to refer to the participation in acts, others to the direction of attractions.
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Same as having unprotected sex if one has HIV, hepatitis etc even if born with it.
 
Thorolfr said:
I’m not convinced that we know enough at this point to say that homosexuality and heterosexuality are distinctly different in the biological, genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie them.
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We know enough to state that nearly all men who engage in a homosexual relationships are biologically male, have a functioning male sexual response, and their sexual response proceeds to finality as it does for males generally - with the emission of male gametes. (I focus on the pure biological here.).

It would be far more persuasive to accept a thesis of some symmetry (heterosexuality / homosexuality) if men who engaged is homosexual relationships differed in their physical makeup and sexual response. As it is, it is impossible to avoid the observation that the behaviour is out of place - that while they are equipped perfectly for one purpose, they may shun it and desire another.
 
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Thorolfr said:
And I think that it’s an overstatement to say that “attraction to females was considered somewhat gauche among aristocrats” in Ancient Rome and Greece.
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I didn’t mean to say that it was ever gauche among aristocrats in Rome. I do believe it was gauche in Athens in the 4th and 5th century BC, at least as pertains romantic relationships, though only perhaps among a small group of aristocrats.
 
Everyone has temptations, and they may differ greatly. Even Jesus was tempted by Satan in the desert.
So temptations are not sinful in themselves.
Only acting upon temptation is sinful.
But the power of grace can overcome temptation (and sin); and this is why God sent His Son, Jesus, to live among us and die for us.
 
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You can ask the same thing about every single sin, disease, disorder, temptation, handicap, sadness, hardship, etc.

Personally, I believe God allows this because when we overcome sin, hardship, temptation, etc.; we inspire others. God wants us to love and support one another and help eachother get to Heaven.

If we had no hardships to overcome, then would we truely know love?
 
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I don’t know. I am not straight and if I didn’t have my boyfriend now or even the ability to feel romantic/physical attraction to a man at all, I don’t think I would pursue being Catholic. I would describe myself as queer/bisexual, I went a decade without any desire to date a man. One of my friends is 100% gay and Catholic, and he goes to confession and confesses his sexual sins like anyone else should. I don’t think anything could make him fall in love with a woman anymore than you could force a straight guy to love a man. Gay Catholics are supposed to be celibate like any other unmarried Catholic, but it is worse burden because while they experience desire and love, they do not have the option to marry. That said, I don’t think pedophilia is in the same category as same sex attraction.
 
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Wolfie said:
One of my friends is 100% gay and Catholic, and he goes to confession and confesses his sexual sins like anyone else should. I don’t think anything could make him fall in love with a woman anymore than you could force a straight guy to love a man. Gay Catholics are supposed to be celibate like any other unmarried Catholic, but it is worse burden because while they experience desire and love, they do not have the option to marry.
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Forgiveness of sins (absolution) in sacramental Catholic confession is conditional…upon full repentance.

This means that the confessing individual must be not only truly and heartfelt sorry/regretful for the sins committed and confessed to a validly ordained priest, but also must resolve not to commit the same sins again. In the case of repeated/ habitual sin God knows the intent of the individual; and the actual absolution comes from God, not the priest who only acts in the person of Christ and cannot know the heart of any person in the confessional. Absolution of a confessed sin is not ‘automatic’ like a magic wand but contingent upon what God knows about an individual’s personal intent not to sin again.

In this particular case, confessing a gay marriage should prompt the confessor priest to ask if the person is prepared to live chastely—meaning no sexual activity—with the same-sexed individual. (“Celibate” means not married.) The couple may continue living together as friends, but the temptation might be harder to resist.

And even though it may not be an individual preference, a person with same-sex attraction is always free to marry, for companionship and family, a person of the opposite sex who is fully informed in the situation.

Controlling lust in many situations (gay or straight) is a common human “burden”—married or not.
 
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Why hasn’t God made me not a jerk yet? Why doesn’t brotherly love towards my neighbor come naturally to me yet? Why hasn’t He freed me, not only of sin, but of all susceptibility to sin?

The unfortunate answer is, not every disordered temptation native to us is just going to go away–now or ever (it might, but not inevitably). I wish that good temper, love for neighbor, chastity, charity, selflessness, and any other number of other virtues came naturally to me … but they just don’t. Evincing them, even when it goes against my grain, is part & parcel of my personal cross … which is light enough, in all conscience, compared to stuff like same-sex attraction. But it’s God’s prerogative to saddle us with all manner of personal crosses, and our responsibility to take them in stride, trusting that we won’t be tested beyond what we–with God’s grace–can manage to withstand.

Please forgive me if I’m being a downer. But it seems better not to be facile about the mightily rugged roads some of us are saddled with weathering.
 
Homosexuality like anything else, is a Brokenness. We as individuals have different crosses to bear it’s not that God doesn’t heal one thing or another. It’s just he doesn’t intervene.

I have an illness epilepsy and I used to ask God why, why me. But now I study and read the Saints and they rejoice in their suffering. It brings them closer to heaven.
In another way I give it to God as an Indulgence for the souls in purgatory to shorten their time.

Hopefully this will help you my friend God bless.
 
I am looking into the Jewish mussar movement writing on spirituality, specifically the book titled “The path of the just.” I offer an unsolicited endorsement of this book that discusses the path to holiness revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures.

The Pont. Bibl. Commission’s document, The Jewish People and their Scripture in the Christian Bible" endorses the careful study of Jewish works of exegesis, and of spirituality, by inference.

Coincidentally, EWTN radio’s Peggy Stanton (of the program The Order of Malta’s Minute with the Catechism, heard daily) raises the identical observation in the catechism that is in this Jewish motivational book – and that is, study of the Torah/Bible is God’s antidote for the commands of the Bible which are both positive and negative in character – avoid evil, do good.

At the highest level of spirituality, there is a way to manage SSA and that is by the study of the scripture on a regular basis. Scripture says over and over that God is our refuge, and those with SSA and other gender disorders need a physical / psychiatric cure, of course. But, the course of treatment at the present time is to immerse oneself in God’s word. This is independently both the Jewish and Catholic direction for those with these disorders.
 
cause homosexuals do not help themselves…God gave man free will to follow Him or not…so it’s on them…who cares?
 
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